In the middle of the night about 300 peaceful protesters were asleep in their tents on the grounds of Occupy Oakland when they were raided and evicted by 500-plus police as reported in Mercury News and other outlets including Occupy Oakland's very own The Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette. The raid, however, won't stop people from occupying. GA meetings are already in effect to organize and plan for the occupation to carry on and peacefully push forward.
On this day of the Occupy Oakland raid launched OCCUPY: An OWS-Inspired Gazette published by n+1. But there's another Occupy gazette. Originally humbly produced on one sheet of paper on a typewriter, the Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette is a running document of Occupy Oakland that began on the third day of the occupation. The gazette claims, "In his epic Cantos, poet Ezra Pound wrote of the African city Wagadu, destroyed four times by men but "now in the mind indestructible." Because we have seen it, we can rebuild it from our hearts and with our hands. The spirit of the Gazette, and of Occupy Oakland, is, we believe, "now in the mind indestructible." Also in this issue is a letter from the Occupation Times asking for people from different occupations to contribute articles regarding occupy events, happenings, and incidents unlikely to be found out about like, for example, on Oct. 16, there occurred a marriage proposal by human mic.
Poet, writer, publisher, and curator David Brazil helps organize and facilitates the Poetry Labor Project happening in the warm and enlightened Bay Area poetry community. It is a confetti mixture of sad, hopeful, happy, and anxious to hear his end of the front concerning the events at Occupy Oakland, especially today when Oakland and Atlanta have undergone serious threats of being shut down by PDs.
David: Before this morning's paramilitary attack on the peaceful (sleeping!) occupation of circa 200 tents, Occupy Oakland had celebrated its two-week anniversary at Oscar Grant Plaza (renamed in honor of Oscar Grant, a African-American victim of police murder aboard a BART train in Oakland). The stories are far too numerous to tell in short compass: over the past weeks I've met literally hundreds of people, of all races & class backgrounds, and shared unbelieveable stories of economic injustice and police abuse, but also hope for the future, a hope literally being born out of the miraculous social space that we collectively created. Thousands of hours of love & work went into that encampment. Literally thousands of people were fed in a free kitchen, which ran on donated food and donated labor. An honor-system lending library to which I donated dozens of books (along with other supporters including local presses AK Press & PM Press) was set up in the Raheim Brown Free School -- an educational institution named after another young African-American man, shot dead by police in a parked car. Daily General Assemblies drew crowds of hundreds daily, who learned how to participate in direct-democratic decision-making processes which were based on consensus models evolved in activist and anarchist communities, but whose spirit descends directly from Athenian democracy.
How are poets active and involved with Occupy Oakland?
David: Bay Area poets have always been concerned with politics. Those of us alive & active today are lucky to partake of a lineage unparalleled anywhere else in the country. "America," by Allen Ginsberg, was written in Berkeley. Among San Francisco's poets laureate are Diane di Prima and Jack Hirschman, intransigent radicals both. Oakland-born poet Robert Duncan, who was a moving spirit in both the Berkeley & San Francisco Renaissances, wrote powerful and visionary poems denouncing the cruelty and horror of the Vietnam War -- poems which read like they could have been written yesterday (if you replace the name "Vietnam" with "Iraq/Afghanistan," and the name "Johnson" with "Obama"). More recently, poets have organized the Poetic Labor Project, which for two years running has invited poets & writers to talk about how they make a living and how that interacts with their writing work. Political discussions are a staple of all our gatherings and parties. We've convened many reading groups around books like The Coming Insurrection & Call, and around the works of both classic authors like Marx and contemporary political thinkers like Francesco "Bifo" Berardi. Most recently, in association with the BART protests against fatal shootings by police aboard Bay Area Rapid Transit, area writers formed an affinity group we call "Writers Bloc."
All of this political work among local writers was good preparation for Occupy Oakland at Oscar Grant Plaza. Poets were down there participating in committees and assemblies, organizing the free school library, cooking, dishwashing, serving food, riding the mobile bike which powered the generator that ran the computers, and even grading papers for their classes.
And, of course, like New York, we joined to gather for a Poetry for the People reading, twelve noon on Sunday, which combined readings from the radical tradition of our revolutionary forebears and elders (including work by writers like Percy Bysshe Shelley, Bertolt Brecht, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Carol Mirakove, Hakim Bey, William S. Burroughs, Aime Cesaire, Claude McKay, and Richard Lovelace) and presentations of original work, some of it composed on the spot, by both published local writers and also plaza occupiers who had something they wanted to say. It was beautiful, and we pledge that despite state repression it will continue.
Tell us about the Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette.
David: The Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette, a daily one-sheet, has been appearing since the third day of the occupation. Today will be its twelfth issue. On the model of New York's Occupied Wall Street Journal, the Gazette was designed both to let interested passersby know what the occupation was about and to serve as an information outlet for the camp itself. I was pleased to discover that, thanks to the Internet, our essays were being read with sympathy as far afield as Illinois -- we received several splendid letters of solidarity from a Quaker group there, in which they expressed full support for our occupation. Like Poetry for the People, and like Occupy Oakland itself, the Gazette will continue despite this morning's cruel, brutal and disgraceful police repression. Today's issue will report on the state violence brought by the office of Mayor Jean Quan on a group of American citizens exercising their right to peaceable assembly, as guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and will call on all readers to come out today at 4pm to the Oakland Public Library (14th & Oak in downtown Oakland), so that we can collectively decide as citizens how we will respond to this criminal action on the part of our elected officials -- a default on their basic responsibility, to defend the highest law of the land.
photo of 2nd The Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette with permission by Alli Warren, 2011.